Autothanatography and contemporary poetry

Abstract

Questions and (im)plausibilities turning on autothanatography's inscribing, or its platforms, somehow upset the traditions of the hauntological and spectropoetics more than the procession of autothanatophonic ghosts and otherworldy beings in literature. Autothanatography forces revisitation of some quite monumental work within literary criticism and theory. The secret without a content that is on the horizon of every autothanatography of "the subject as it strategizes with its death" comes to poetry's casts, the traditions of criticism would be led to expect, with different apprehensibility and tonalities. Meanwhile, and in conclusion, contemporary poetry ploughs that kind of line itself, not least in Jorie Graham's Fast, a work of mourning and of quite heterogenous autobiothanatoheterography. The critical work on poetic autothanatography/autobiothanatoheterography will have to go there too, in time – but not here, not just yet. There will be worlds and times and deaths enough for that.